


let us go then, you and I

by foreverwriting9



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, F/M, Not A Fix-It, a little bit of a road trip, post-Ersatz Elevator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:02:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24041035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverwriting9/pseuds/foreverwriting9
Summary: "You and me, Olivia Caliban," he says, and in the fading light of the desert his eyes are a deep, deep blue, "we could save the world."Or, the interminable drive to VFD is actually very interminable and becomes something of a road trip.
Relationships: Olivia Caliban/Jacques Snicket
Comments: 9
Kudos: 36





	let us go then, you and I

**Author's Note:**

> I've had the outline of this fic with me for so long, and this pandemic has finally given me some time to sit down and give it the attention it deserves.
> 
> I know that it's been quite awhile since Olivia and Jacques were 1) on our screens and 2) alive, but I hope that someone finds some enjoyment in this fic.

"We should pull off here for a rest," Jacques says, several hours into their interminable drive, as the desert sun begins to slip beneath the horizon.

Olivia nods. "Good idea. We'll need all the energy we can get in order to rescue the Baudelaires and the Quagmires."

“Exactly,” he agrees and pulls the taxi off to the side of the road, kicking up dust and rocks in its wake. "Tea?" The question is out of his mouth before they have even come to a complete stop.

“Of course, if you have some.” She can’t quite stop the smile that comes next. It’s like he knows her.

Jacques swings the taxi door open and slides out. Olivia follows, moving to meet him at the trunk of the vehicle where he pulls out two mugs, several teabags, and a large blanket for each of them. His smile turns almost goofy then, wide and excited.

“Time to set up camp, Olivia Caliban.”

  
  


Later, after the tea has been poured and the blankets laid out: 

"It's dangerous, you know. What we do." He's poking a stick in the small campfire he made and very carefully not making eye contact. It's possible that he's trying to warn her away but wants her to stay at the same time.

She looks over at him, thinks of climbing forty-five stories up in the air. "I know."

"And you're really okay with that?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I want to help," she tries, the words honest and true, but it's not enough, not when she feels at home for the first time in a way she can't explain. Not when she feels like this may be the most important thing she's ever done. She tries again, "I think this is where I was always supposed to be."

That brings a smile to his face, and when he finally turns to look at her she watches the flicker of the fire light the curve of his jaw, his lips. "I think so too," he admits.

  
  


"Do you have any undercover identities you could use?"

It's their second night pulling over onto the side of the road and camping in the desert. Stars are strewn overhead and they're both warming themselves with mugs of tea, bitter and strong.

Olivia squints at Jacques from across their small bonfire. "An undercover identity?"

"Yeah, you know," he says, and his voice suddenly adopts a heavy French accent. He pretends to throw a scarf over one shoulder. "Someone you can pretend to be when our enemies are closing in."

She laughs, spluttering into her tea. He sounds, weirdly, like the candelabra from _Beauty and the Beast._

"C'mon," Jacques teases, his voice normal again, "you must have something."

"All right, all right, but you can't laugh."

"Hand on my heart." He presses his right hand to his chest and winks at her.

A deep breath, ignoring the butterflies in her stomach, and then, "Welcome! _Welcome_! The spirits are restless tonight, please, but Madame will tell your fortune, Madame will show you your heart's desire."

It's a bit over the top, a heavy accent she had once heard on a gypsy woman at a traveling circus when she was a child. Olivia can tell that Jacques stops a laugh just short, grin tugging hard at his mouth as he watches her.

She presses her fingers to her temples, trying to look contemplative before eventually whispering, "Yes...I have vision I receive visit from handsome stranger."

The grin on Jacques' face becomes something else now, something more dangerous that sends electricity jolting down her spine. "A handsome stranger?"

"Yes, yes, is business term."

He barks out a laugh at that, the corners of his eyes crinkling wonderfully and she wants to make him look this happy always. "That," he says, still laughing, "that needs to be one of your undercover identities."

  
  


He hums while he drives. No song in particular, just soft, lilting melodies that fill the silence of the cab when they take breaks from talking. When it's her turn to drive she finds herself doing the same thing, trying to match the rhythm and pitch of his earlier songs.

Once, he whistles. It's slow and mournful, and something about it makes Olivia think of inevitabilities, of fate and endings set in stone. She doesn't try to copy that song.

  
  


"Marshmallows?"

"Marshmallows," she agrees, and puts down a small batch of firewood just in time to catch the bag of marshmallows that Jacques tosses to her from the trunk of his taxi.

He pulls out two roasting forks next, and looks, for a moment, like he considers tossing those to her as well, but then thinks better of it. Instead, he walks over and hands them to her.

In a matter of moments, he has the firewood she has already collected assembled into a nearly perfect, unlit campfire. Olivia doesn't know where he gets them from, but suddenly there are matches in his hands too, and now he is watching her, gaze heavy and thoughtful. Somehow she knows exactly what he is asking.

Wordlessly, she sets down the marshmallows and roasting forks, takes the matches from him, and strikes one.

"Is this a test?"

He nods. "Yes it is."

For a moment, she considers: the desert swallowed in fire, everything screaming hot and deadly. Everything turned to ash and smoke in its wake. Maybe the fire could catch up with Count Olaf and eat him alive, burn all of the hate and evil and spontaneous musical numbers out of him.

But she knows that isn't the answer.

Olivia drops the match onto the pile of firewood. She reaches for a roasting fork and then hands it across to Jacques. Offers him the bag of marshmallows. She thinks he looks proud, in a way. Full of hope. He looks like he has found another noble person in a world full of villains.

When they both have marshmallows speared onto the ends of their roasting forks, he holds his out to her in a toast. "You and me, Olivia Caliban," he says, and in the fading light of the desert his eyes are a deep, deep blue, "we could save the world."

  
  


Driving and stopping, driving and stopping. It feels like her life has become one never-ending montage of the same desert skyline and strip of road. Driving and stopping, driving and stopping and-

"This drive may be even more interminable than I thought."

_Jacques_. Driving and stopping and Jacques. He is handsome and sturdy, with a well-curated collection of books in the trunk of his car. Olivia already knows that she is in trouble when it comes to him.

She looks over to the passenger seat, where he is sitting after they agreed it was time to switch drivers before one or both of them found the drive so interminable that they flung themselves from the taxi. "I was just thinking that," she admits.

"Great minds," he says with a smile. "At least the company's good. I once had to share the backseat of a similar cab with a Tibetan Funereal Snake, and the drive was significantly less cheerful."

"A snake?"

"A friend of mine was a big fan of snakes."

"A herpetologist?"

"That too." There's a moment of silence, his gaze trained out the window on the desert landscape sliding by, and then: "I wish you could have met them. All of them."

"Tell me about them," she says, because she wishes she could have met them too, these shining, distant people who cracked codes together, fought fires together, and apparently even hung out with snakes together.

And so he does.

  
  


Olivia dreams.

She dreams in reds and oranges, she dreams in _fire_.

She's in a library, fire licking against the outside of the windows and smoke curling up around her. She's supposed to be looking for something. "Jacques?" There's movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turns to catch it, but not in time. Instead, she's met with a tall bookcase full of revenge tragedy plays and several gilded editions of Jane Eyre.

"Baudelaires?" Olivia turns again and finds another bookcase in her way. "Quagmires?"

It's beginning to get hotter in the library, more smoky. Some of the windows overhead shatter, sending glass raining down. There's panic rearing its head, constricting Olivia's chest. She needs to breathe. She needs to think.

Olivia closes her eyes, counts to ten. _What would Jacques do?_

When she opens her eyes again her mind is clear. She turns one last time, and suddenly there is a path, an opening between bookcases wide enough to walk through. Carefully, she picks her way between the bookcases, and finds herself in another space surrounded by more bookcases. This time there are two paths, one on either side of her.

_A labyrinth._

"Olivia?" Jacques steps out from the path to her left.

She doesn't think to be embarrassed when her first reaction is to run over and wrap him in a hug. Distantly, she can hear the roar of the fire growing ever stronger, but one of his hands is cradling the back of her head and the other is at her waist, and suddenly, impulsively, she wants to burn with him.

"I have to show you the way," he says, mostly into her shoulder.

She pulls back from him to nod, realizing that the smoke from the fire is starting to choke her lungs when she coughs out, "Lead on, Jacques Snicket."

Jacques takes her hand and tugs her gently after him, deeper into the stacks of books.

They take another left, then go straight, take a right, a left, a right, and another right, straight, left, ri-

"You don't have any red string," Olivia points out. "How will we know where we're going?"

"A volunteer always knows." The corners of his mouth pull up into something like the smile she's become so fond of recently. "And I have a keen sense of direction."

A roar that is not the fire almost drowns out his words. At the sound, Jacques comes to an abrupt stop. "Did you hear that? It sounds like the angry roar of a second-rate actor who just read a disparaging review of his latest performance."

"Olaf?"

"Who else?"

There's movement again, out of the corner of her eye. She's quick enough this time, quick enough to see a curling pair of horns poking out above some bookcases further off. Jacques squeezes her hand.

"I'll take care of it, you wait here."

She knows, with absolute certainty, that she should not wait here. That she should go with him and face whatever trouble there is together. That's what partners do.

But before she can so much as protest, he squeezes her hand once more, leans in to brush a kiss against her forehead, and whispers, "I'll be back, Olivia Caliban." And then he is gone.

He doesn't come back.

  
  


He makes her tea, in the mornings. Every morning. When she wakes up, face pressed into his extra pillow, there is always the smell of tea and a fresh, hot mug sitting somewhere near her. She has no idea how he times it so perfectly.

This morning, Olivia sits up and takes a long drink of the tea, scanning around for Jacques. 

He's a couple hundred feet away, his back to her, hands on his hips, staring off into the horizon. (She will think of him this way later on, a darkened statue against the burning brightness of the desert, golden sunlight in his hair.) When she stands up and begins making her over to him, she realizes that he's looking at something.

He hears her approach, but doesn't move to look at her until she stands right next to him. "We're almost there," he says, pointing to a dark, irregular shape in the distance that is the Village of Fowl Devotees.

It doesn't fill her with the same sense of triumph and accomplishment she thought it would. They're so close to being able to save the Quagmires and the Baudelaires, and that's the best thing in the world right now, but she also can't shake off her dream. Can't shake off the feeling of him leaving and never coming back.

"We should change clothes," Jacques points out, interrupting her thoughts. He's already moving toward the back of his taxi, and Olivia turns to follow him with her gaze. With her back to the town she can pretend that their interminable drive does not yet have an end in sight.

"What did you have in mind?"

He pops the trunk open and disappears behind it for a second, rummaging around. Moments later, he comes back out with a cowboy hat in one hand and a bandana in the other. "Something thematically appropriate."

  
  


A couple hours later she is wearing both the cowboy hat and the bandana and watching the desolate town of VFD draw ever nearer.

"Let's stop here for a second," Jacques says, about an hour into their drive. "The crows should be moving soon."

Olivia doesn't fully understand until she steps out of the taxi and shades her eyes with one hand, in just enough time to see a dark cloud of feathers and beaks rise up over the small town in front of them. It reminds her of something, this shadowy, foreboding murder of crows. Something like--

" _Momento mori_ ," she whispers. The motto of her old school tastes ancient and sinister on her tongue.

Jacques comes to stand next to her and slips his hand into hers. His palm against hers, warm and alive; but he says, solemnly, "Remember you will die."

"What if we just kept driving?" She hates the words as soon as they come out of her mouth, hates that she has even allowed the idea to form, but she _wishes_.

Jacques smiles sadly at her like he knows, like the same thought has crossed his mind but he hasn't let the words take root in his mouth. He answers, softly, "Then we wouldn't be volunteers."

  
  


He thinks of Olivia.

Of course he does.

He thinks of her smile and her eyes, the shade of her hair with the desert moon reflecting on it. He thinks of her lips pressed against his and everything that could have been. He thinks of everything but the evil man standing over him, a deadly crowbar in one hand.

Jacques wonders, vaguely, about Lemony. If this is what Lemony felt for so long. The painful ache under your ribcage of knowing that you found someone that your heart wanted to love for the rest of its existence. It crushes all the breath out of his lungs, this feeling, and he _wants-_

_H_ e _wants Olivia._

There is a split second of pure, unadulterated longing and then, blackness.


End file.
